The family of Jahi McMath wants answers after the 13-year-old girl suffered complications soon after having her tonsils out. ‘She wasn’t able to talk, and she started to write notes to her mother saying I’m swallowing too much mucus, mom — am I OK? Mom — I feel like I’m choking,’ her uncle says. The family is hoping for a Christmas miracle by keeping Jahi on life support.

She was just supposed to have her tonsils out, and now her heartbroken family wants answers.
Jahi McMath, 13, was declared brain dead on Thursday, three days after undergoing surgery at Children’s Hospital Oakland. Despite the tragic development, the family is holding out hope and refusing to take Jahi off life support.
“It’s shock, it’s disbelief,” uncle Omari Sealey told the San Jose Mercury News. “You never think something like this will happen to you.”

Jahi, an eighth grader at E.C. Reems Academy of Technology and Arts in Oakland, underwent the tonsils procedure on Dec. 9 in order to improve her sleep apnea. After the surgery she asked for a popsicle and seemed OK, but just 30 minutes later she started choking on her own blood, NBC reported.
“She wasn’t able to talk, and she started to write notes to her mother saying I’m swallowing too much mucus, mom — am I OK? Mom — I feel like I’m choking,” Sealey told the Mercury News. “And she began to write these notes because she couldn’t talk because there was so much blood — it wasn’t mucus — it was blood. But my sister, the mother, was too afraid to let her know that it was blood and not mucus.”
Jahi went into cardiac arrest and was revived, but was declared brain dead two days later, family members told the Mercury News. They are urging the hospital to investigate what they believe to be shoddy emergency care.

‘here catch them with the cup so we can measure them,'” mom Nailah Winkfield told ABC.
Grandmother Sandra Chatman, a surgical nurse at a different hospital, was stunned by the lack of attention that Jahi received.
“I went in and I said ‘is this normal, do you guys find this to be normal?,'” Chatman told ABC. “And they said ‘I don’t really know,’ and I said ‘well then get a doctor.'”

Sealey told NBC that family members believe “an error was committed by the hospital, either before, during, or after surgery. I absolutely believe that somewhere along the way, there was a protocol that wasn’t followed, or there was a surgical error.”
Hospital spokeswoman Melinda Krigel said in a statement: “We’re very sad about this outcome, about what’s happened to her, but at this point I have no information on the details of the surgery. We will certainly investigate what happened. In any surgery there are risks and there can be unexpected, unanticipated complications.”

The family is hoping for a Christmas miracle by keeping Jahi on life support, even though doctors say she is brain dead.
“My little girl in there, my little niece, is in there with her own heartbeat, which lets me know that she is alive,” Sealey told NBC.

source: Daily news